Mammoth find on Felixstowe beach
A BEACHCOMBER has made a mammoth find on Felixstowe's shores - one of the great woolly beast's teeth.
A BEACHCOMBER has made a mammoth find on Felixstowe's shores - one of the great woolly beast's teeth.
Clive Bamberger was walking at Landguard when he found the fossilised tooth on the sand between the high and low water marks.
He said: “I am always looking for interesting bits and pieces and I knew immediately what it was.”
As a boy, Mr Bamberger, who runs the Saxon Upholstery shop in Hamilton Road, Felixstowe, and friends Dave Berry, who was killed in a motorcycle crash two years ago, and Nick Carver used to go fossil hunting.
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He said: “The one thing we always wanted to find was a mammoth's tooth - and it's kind of nice to have found it after all these years.
“I am sure if Dave had been with me he would have been as jealous as hell.
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“Mammoth teeth grow in three segments and I think I have found one segment, probably from a calf or a smaller mammoth.”
The tooth was on the shore in front of The Butts and because of the steady southward movement of material in another 300 yards it would have been washed into Harwich Harbour and probably lost forever.
Mr Bamberger, 51, has also found around 200 shark's teeth on the beaches - the largest belonging to a megalodon, which became extinct around 1.5 million years ago and is the largest flesh-eating fish ever to have existed.
He said: “It's becoming more difficult to find fossils at Felixstowe beaches because of the sand dumped here for sea defences, but there are places at Felixstowe Ferry you can still find them and across at Bawdsey.”
Have you found anything interesting on Suffolk's shores? Write to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN, or e-mail eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk
FAST FACTS: Mammoth
When mammoths were common the North Sea didn't exist and the UK and Europe were one landmass.
The great woolly creatures lived between 120,000 and 8,000 years ago, disappearing after the end of the ice age.
Some scientists believe they were hunted to extinction by man, others that they died from disease or climate change.
They were huge creatures - five metres high with tusks up to 16ft long.
Mammoths lived on plants and tree parts, which they would dig out of the snow with their tusks.
Ivory tusks, preserved in peat bogs, are still found and sold without regulation because they are not an endangered species.
